Agreed, but people trumpet it anyways, when it's patently horse puckey.
And to the extent that somebody wants to challenge an individual who has actually advocated such, that might be a different story. There are some such people here. Using this line to accuse "The West" of hypocrisy is a different game altogether, though.
Not usually, but in this particular case, does it not strike you as ironic?
No, why would it?
No...and while males don't necessarily all realize how their gender roles hurt them, those gender roles do.
Some males have little trouble realizing such. These would typically be males that do not fit nicely into the assigned roles, as in the female case.
If they are demanding-and trying to force other cultures clean up their act...while not making efforts to fix the inequalities present in their own culture...there's hypocrisy.
First of all you are, again, addressing a strawman. If you can point me to somebody making a stink about the plight of foreign women while turning a blind eye to oppression of women at home, then by all means go ahead and challenge them on it.
Second of all, it has yet to be established that the prohibitions on publication of nudity (of either gender) qualify as a gender inequality. Let alone, one that merits being mentioned in the same sentence as the sort of thing that the Taliban advocates.
Third of all: regardless, so what? If you're insisting that I have to choose between condemning the worst instances of oppression of women, or avoiding being called a hypocrit by anonymous internet agenda-pushers, I will choose the former without the slightest hesitation.
In fact, I'll go further than that and assert that anyone pushing such a false choice is themselves an enemy of women's liberation. They are pushing an agenda to silence critics of the worst instances of female oppression in the world. That they think they've found a cute way to do that, by making the perfect the enemy of the good, doesn't mean they have a point. It just means that they're feckless and craven.
Women still do make less than men in western society.
Point me to a person who thinks that's perfectly fine, and also goes around harping on the plight of women under the Taliban.
If the standard is that anyone who is not perfect - or even, lives in a society that is not perfect - is not allowed to complain about anyone else, then the outcome is simple: everybody has to shut up about everything, for ever. You are not allowed to note hypocrisy in others, since I guarantee we can find some instance of hypocrisy somewhere in your worldview. Or, to run with the even-more-debased standard actually at issue here: we can find something which we can
construe as hypocrisy, and thereby silence you.
Are you starting to see why this line of rhetoric is incompatible with productive, mature dialogue?
Is there a push to fix this among the men in the United States?
There's a push to fix that amongst
feminists, of both genders, in the United States and elsewhere. Which would be the exact same people that decry the treatment of women under, say, the Taliban. And there's progress - most college graduates in the USA are women, as are most managers, and most workers. It's to the point where trendy analysis magazines are lamenting "the end of men:"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
But, if you can identify any craven "feminists" who are just exploiting it to further some specific agenda, then by all means out them. You could probably find some high Bush admin officials that would fit the bill, who tried to use such to drum up support for taking out the Taliban. But it just doesn't wash as a generic criticism of "the West." To get to that, you have to rely on a slew of fallacies.